How Leaf Green Died Twice
by suzukeii
Summary: Death is fleeting.


**CHAMPION SHOT DOWN**

 **BY GUNMAN AT INDIGO**

 **Wound fatal**

When Blue Oak first saw the morning headlines in the _Viridian Post_ , he played it off as a joke — a cruel, tactless joke, but a joke nonetheless. It was, after all, the first of April, known for tactless jokes.

 _Pretty elaborate_ , he conceded when the same news played on the telly. Seems they'd gotten every major news network in on the prank. Even the region's largest paper, _The Kanto Spectrum_ , had devoted its front page to an article covering the shooting. Then Daisy called him to ask him how he was doing, okay? And did he close the Gym out of respect? He played along with her, though no-one had tried to challenge him yet today anyway.

It was a few hours later, when he was watching yet another news cover of the "tragic event" and even Lorelei was scrunching her nose with tears on the screen, when the realisation hit him like a ton of bricks.

The Champion was dead.

Leaf Green was dead.

Leaf was dead.

Suddenly he felt numb.

oOo

He sat outside on their deck, the spring-afternoon sunlight warm on his skin. Zero oktas of cloud cover, like nature hadn't gotten the memo yet.

Blue tried to feel anything but numbness. The quiet girl whom he'd endlessly teased, the brave girl whom he'd declared his rival, the beautiful girl whom he'd loved, and now lost. Oblivious to his depression, people about town had whispered of Rocket ties and and illicit dealings. He didn't have the energy to yell at them or even scoff in disgust and in defence of Leaf.

That night, her voice came to him. "I'm sorry," it said, but when he opened his eyes, his room was as Leaf-less as it had been when he'd retired to bed.

Slowly, as the initial shock reverberating through the region faded, Blue could gather information that wasn't contradictory or completely ridiculous.

The shooting had occurred only a few hours after he'd left Indigo to return to Pallet. (He'd secured a job a couple days earlier as the next Viridian Gym Leader in the event he lost the title, thankfully.) Leaf had already been declared the reigning Champion on the news for a couple of hours by then, plenty of time for someone to convince himself to murder her and make the trip with gun in hand. By the mercy of Arceus, the bullet had gone straight through her prefrontal cortex, killing her instantly. Then the gunman, an identified Clarence Teller, had shot himself with the only other bullet in the pistol.

Of one thing Blue was absolutely certain.

 _If he hadn't lost against her in the bid for the Champion title, he would have died instead of her._

Blue steepled his hands beneath his nose, the computer screen glowing in front of his face. Would he have preferred it that way? His family and friends, the entire region, mourning his premature death? Leaf sitting at his funeral service, wondering why him, why him, _why her_? In a sort of twisted way, he wondered if she would have cried for him.

No, he decided. That would have been a hundred times worse.

Out of respect to the late Champion, the funeral service was conducted with a closed casket. A photograph of her stood on the lid, and Blue noted wryly that it was the official one taken upon anointment as Champion. It would have been taken a couple of hours or so before she'd died. How convenient.

He approached the casket wordlessly after the eulogies, and when he reached out to touch her face behind the smooth glass of the frame, he forgot how to breathe and his vision blurred. His hand fell back to his side limply, and he moved out of the way for others to pay their respects.

If the reigning Champion is no longer able to carry out his duties, and there is no successor from the result of a battle, power is conferred to the previous Champion. Agatha had the tact to refrain from asking Blue during the service, and he'd disappeared by the time she sought him out afterward.

He would refuse by letter the next day.

oOo

Fifteen-year-old Lyra Hardwell thinks there is a certain beauty to Mount Silver, despite the freezing wind that bites into any exposed flesh and the wetness seeping into her shoes. Those moments when the gusts halt and there is an eerie stillness in the air, the powdery snow settles into a soft, rhythmic sprinkle, the land stretches out far below, forests and fields and mountains, those are the moments that bare the true, exquisite beauty of the icy sierra.

She isn't normally given to scaling crags, no. In fact, this might be the first or second mountain she's ever climbed. But instead of regretting the decision and the frozen burning in her nose and cheeks, she keeps going.

Her mother has always joked about her hard-headedness, and with good reason.

The object of her journey: the legendary Moltres, who is purported to live in the depths of the mountain. Elm requested that she, with her Champion privileges and travelling experience, attempt to find the beast and observe it for his research.

Despite her qualifications, Lyra is still having trouble navigating the unstable rocks and uneven terrain. Well, she supposes, sixteen little pieces of metal aren't exactly a map.

 _Really_ , she thinks to herself, because she doesn't dare open her mouth to let the wind dry it out in a moment. _I don't think this is the right way_.

But the view is breathtaking from the the summit. Miles and miles of land about her, forest, farmland, sea, rivers cutting through like black, winding dragonair and towns like sprinkles scattered haphazardly. At this moment, she knows she is, quite literally, on top of the world; after all, Mount Silver is guessed to be the highest peak of all, though some argue Mount Coronet surpasses it by at least a thousand feet. But here, it doesn't matter.

She pulls herself over the last ledge, the snow beating relentlessly against her face. Maybe Ethan will lend her his goggles next time. At the summit, snow-blanketed rocks reach jaggedly for the sky and form a dark-mouthed cave that catches her eye, but not because it might be an entrance to the interior of the mountain.

There is a figure lying in the snow at the mouth of the cave, just a wispy silhouette past squinting eyelids and thick snowfall. Feeling the immediacy of the sub-zero temperatures herself, Lyra stumbles through the snow drifts and over buried rock to get to him and aid him. But "him", she realises when she approaches and falls to her weak knees, is "her".

Fifteen-year-old Lyra Hardwell has never seen a frozen corpse, but she thinks this young woman is dead. She represses the urge to vomit.

There is no stench of decay. Meat doesn't rot in a freezer. Her skin is waxy and an unnaturally bluish hue, ice too delicately coating her eyelashes. Her coat is half-off for some reason, and Lyra, naïvely, thinks this was a mistake to start the hypothermia. She cannot guess how long this woman has been dead, but she knows, with some sort of primal, intrinsic knowledge, that she is far beyond resuscitation.

She scrabbles at the clothes, frozen to her body, through pockets, anything, the zip breaks in her hand, and finally, between the shirt and marble skin, there are six Pokéballs. The only possibility of identification at this point, without calling her in, and she finds they are all uselessly frozen except for one, strangely, that blinks out a halfhearted "VENUSAUR" when checked.

Lyra crawls into the cave to escape the snow that still buffets her, but she keeps the corpse in sight as her numb fingers fumble with her Pokégear. She dials for Elm's lab and is almost pleasantly surprised when there is service.

As the dialling tone sounds, Lyra looks at the young woman again and brushes a bit of snow from her cheeks. She is gracefully beautiful, in a way, she thinks, like the mountain itself.

* * *

 **A/N: So what happens when in HG and SS, the player is too late to battle Red?**

 **hahahaha _hahahaha_**

 **Came from the idea of the FR/LG player faking his death so he wouldn't have to deal with all the publicity and then the questions of why he decided to quit, yanno.**


End file.
